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Brooklyn's Dodgers This page intentionally left blank Brooklyn's Dodgers The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball 1947-1957 Carl E. Prince OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York Oxford Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Be Ibadan Copyright © 1996 by Carl E. Prince First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1997 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prince, Carl E. Brooklyn's Dodgers : the Bums, the borough, and the best of baseball 1947-1957 / Carl E. Prince, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-509927-3 ISBN 0-19-511578-3 (Pbk.) 1. Brooklyn Dodgers (Baseball team)—History. 2. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Social life and customs. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)— History. I. Title. GV875.B7P75 1996 796.357'64'0974723—dc20 95-26483 13579108642 Printed in the United States of America For Jon, Liz, and Marcia This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction ix 1. Integration: Dodgers' Dilemma, Dodgers' Response 3 2. Political Culture: Reds and Dodger Blue 23 3. The Dodgers' Male Culture: The New \brk Rivalries 45 4. Male Culture: Owners, Chokers, and Dumb Kids 60 5. The Baseball Culture of Brooklyn's Women 77 6. The Dodgers and Male Bar Culture 92 7. The Dodgers and Brooklyn's Ethnic Isolation 102 8. Kids' Ball: The Dodgers and Brooklyn's Boys 119 9. The Outer Edges of Dodger Memory 138 Appendices 149 Notes 153 Index 193 vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction When Bobby Thomson's home run cleared the high left field wall in the Polo Grounds in 1951, my mother, a normally voluble woman, got up from the sofa, turned the tiny television off, and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. When my father, white-faced, came home from work two hours later, he en- tered the apartment with an equally unusual silence. He asked us (I was sixteen; my sister thirteen) where our mother was. We pointed to the bedroom; he peeked in, backed out, closed the door, and for the only time I can remember, made supper. I never before or since saw him at a stove. True, he only heated up four cans of Spaghetti-O's, and opened three bottles of Royal Crown, but it was supper. My mother stayed in the bedroom for sixteen hours. She appeared the next day to take up her usual domestic responsibilities. She never said a word about that loss, that season, that home run. Not ever. We took our baseball seriously; it was a common basis for communication in a family that needed it. I still take it seriously as a means of communication. Now, on another coast where I spend my summers, my grown children and I share season tickets to a major league club. No, heaven forbid, not the L.A. Dodgers. That is no team of mine. Now I follow the Oakland Athletics, ix INTRODUCTION who play in a yuppy, smoke-free stadium that is as far from the subculture of Ebbets Field as a stadium can be. Around New York and across America, Brooklyn's Dodgers remain familiar figures. Prime-time television's Brooklyn Bridge introduced them in a local context to a national audience. Fea- ture stories on The Boys of Summer abound. Even twenty years later, Roger Kahn's memorable book still moves me and, I know, many others. And when the Los Angeles Dodgers, beginning in 1990, tried to force "The Brooklyn Dodger Sports Bar" to change its name, it became a David and Goliath struggle in the nation's media. (See Chapter 9.) The New Yorker's cover of March 7, 1994, featured at its center a banner in a deco collage of New York reading WELCOME BACK DODGERS! That visual spoof was filled with other references to the unattainable for New Yorkers, like polite cab drivers, a portrait of complete racial harmony, and omnipresent street cleaners and sanitation men. Jackie Robinson's name, and now the legend surrounding him, is a part of most discussions when race progress or the lack of it is the subject. Robinson, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Leo Durocher, Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, and Branch Rickey have all written books or had books written about them—or both. So the Brooklyn Dodgers remain alive and well in memory, as the last chapter of this book recounts. The team is now seen through a nostalgic haze, a special team playing in a distinctive decade that is the focus of this book. It was distinctive because it was the team's last and most successful decade in the borough. In the years 1947 to 1957 the Dodgers formed a vital, bonded, win- ning team, but when October rolled around, its flaws surfaced painfully. As a unit, the ball club was tagged a "choke" team. In a macho game, Dodger manhood was always suspect. This stigma is common in sports, and recently in passing it has been the prop- erty of the Buffalo Bills' football team. The Dodgers' case was special because it locked into its unique role as pioneers in race integration. Thus both race and male culture form important fo- cuses of this study. The Dodgers did play out, over a decade, a kind of racial and macho Oberammergau. In this book, male acting-out is described both on and off the field. It is as well a broader study of Brooklyn and its people, not only the men, but the community's women and adolescents as x I RODUCTION well. For many if not most Brooklynites, baseball was a central focus in their lives. Kahn's Boys of Summer, Peter Golenbock's Bums, and Jules Tygiel's Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, have all helped entrench in the American mind this uniquely legendary team. My study explores some realities of life on the ballclub, looks in depth into the community in which it played, and tries to place both in the broad social and political context of the postwar era of which the Dodger team was a part. Jackie Robinson's presence stirred up deep-seated racial tensions, within the team, with other teams, and among the public. But the Dodgers developed an uncanny ability to overcome their own prejudices and to unite in the face of race-baiting from other teams, the St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Braves in particular. Reflecting the times and the Brooklyn community, the Dodger team was probably more consistently anticommunist than any other professional team of that Cold War decade. Right-wing management, in the persons of Branch Rickey and Walter O'Mal- ley, resonated well with both the team and most of the Brooklyn community. For example, several Dodgers revered Douglas Ma- cArthur and Richard Nixon, both frequent visitors to Ebbets Field. Jackie Robinson, a radical activist in seeking national inte- gration, nevertheless was strongly anticommunist and, in general terms outside race issues, politically conservative. For many in that era, the Dodgers appeared politically larger than life and were publicly identified with national issues in ways few teams have been before or since. In that political context, the Dodger club was very much a part of the conformist culture of the 1950s. This was true as well in its inevitable bouts with gender mat- ters. Typically macho, several Dodger players, like many male ath- letes of that generation, mimed the values of the society from which they were spawned. Their relationships with women were no less complex than woman fans' relationships with the team. Male attitudes and the prices they exacted from the players form an important part of this story. Recently, scholars have concluded that the ways that organized male sports are played "influence de- veloping masculine identities" and provoke sexual aggression.* * See notes at the end of the book. Each note is keyed to the page number and paragraph to which it refers by italicizing the first four words of the paragraph. xi INTRODUCTION Gender, then, is an important part of this story. Instances of male sexual aggression on the Dodgers was evident in some team members' involvement with "Baseball Annies" (groupies) on the one hand, and the handling of paternity suits by management on the other. Gender is also a factor in woman fans' relationship to the team. The identities of women like Pulitzer Prize poet Mari- anne Moore and working-class stiff Hilda Chester, for example, help reveal the complexities of gender roles in sports in the insu- lar fifties. This book is also about Brooklyn. Serendipitously or not, the team reflected the scrappy working-class culture of that borough. The close relationship between deeply ethnic Brooklyn and its team was perhaps most evident in its schools and on the Parade Grounds, a mammoth athletic field, probably the best-appointed in the nation, where most organized amateur sports were played. The Dodgers shrewdly signed as many as ten Brooklyn boys each year, grooming them in the intricately organized Parade Grounds sandlot programs.

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